Development of a low-cost agricultural remote sensing system based on an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)

To provide and improved remote sensing a system based on an autonomous UAV was developed. The system was based on an easily transportable helicopter platform weighing less than 14 kg. Equipped with a multi-spectral camera and autonomous system, the UAV system was capable of acquiring multi-spectral images at the desired locations and times. An extended Kalman filter (EKF) based UAV navigation system was designed and implemented using sensor fusion techniques. A ground station was designed to be the interface between a human operator and the UAV to carry out mission planning, flight command activation, and real-time flight monitoring. Based on the navigation data, and the waypoints generated by the ground station, the UAV could be automatically navigated to the desired waypoints and hover around each waypoint to collect field image data. An experiment using the UAV system to monitor turf grass glyphosate application demonstrated the system, which indicated the UAV system provides a flexible and reliable method of sensing agricultural field with high spatial and temporal resolution of image data.

Research highlights
► A low cost agricultural remote sensing system based on an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle is developed.
► A ground base station for mission planning, flight command activation and flight monitoring is developed.
► Anavigation system for measuring position and attitude of the UAV is developed.
► A flight path planning method to determine the necessary overlaps of the UAV images while the UAV needs to cover a larger field area with many images is developed.
► The temporal monitoring capability through evaluation of an experiment applying glyphosate to a turf grass field is investigated.